America’s Golden Girl

It’s obvious that Gabby Douglas’s world will never be the same. But the 16-year-old, who this summer became the first black woman of any nationality (and only the fourth American) to win gold in the individual all-around in women’s gymnastics, didn’t get there by living a normal life. In London, where Douglas’s poise far exceeds that of the journalists swarming around her, Buzz Bissinger talks to the sweetheart of the 2012 Olympics and finds the real story is about a family’s love.

MOMENT OF GLORY U.S. Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas, in London, August 2012.

Members of the Fourth Estate, interchangeable in their uniforms of studied rumpledness, laminated credentials dangling from their necks like dog tags, surround a teenage girl of impeccable skill and impeccable figure in an impeccable red-white-and-blue leotard. The journalists come from all over the world—CBS, Reuters, Televisa in Mexico, The Washington Post, a network based in France that goes out to 60 countries—asking her questions with far less poise than this 16-year-old going on 26 displays in answering them.

She is the one who should be nervous, given her age and size (four feet eleven inches and 94 pounds). She is the one who should be intimidated as the crowd around her grows, a seemingly impenetrable wall of reporters, although, with her athleticism, she could probably just vault over all of us if she felt the need to escape.

But it is the journalists who are nervous, questions asked not because they are interesting but to prolong the opportunity to be around this girl and her singular stardom—the giggly laugh, the melt-in-your-mouth smile, the words speeding from her lips as if there will never be enough time in life to say them all. The setting, the Adidas media lounge, across from Olympic Park, in East London, is surreal, towering rows of glossy red Adidas athletic shoes looking down upon this circle of sycophancy like glazed bleacher bums. But the girl in the middle is as real as it ever gets.

The journalists are frankly embarrassing. They ask if they can pose with her for a smartphone picture. They congratulate her over and over again. They seem not simply in awe of her but magnetized by the force field of her aura. It’s as if she were a new Batman character, Gymnastica.

(The fact that I effuse over her like Victoria Falls, and also have my picture taken with her, should be considered merely collegial.)

This has become a familiar ritual, ever since Gabrielle Douglas, known to the world as Gabby, became the “It girl” of the London Olympics six days earlier, on August 2, winning the gold medal in the individual all-around competition in women’s gymnastics, only the fourth American in history to do so, and the first black woman of any nationality. And that was only three nights after she played a key role in leading the U.S. to its second-ever women’s-team gold medal.

“How do you feel about all the attention?” I ask her in the middle of it. “Is it weird? Is it strange?”

“I love all the attention, people noticing me. ‘There’s the gymnast. There she is!’ ”

She does seem to love the attention. And the attention loves her. Which is why companies and corporations—literally hundreds of them, according to Douglas’s agent, Sheryl Shade—are salivating for her endorsement, which could earn her as much as $10 million over the next four years.

“What’s the first thing you’re going to buy when the money comes in?” I ask. “Tell the truth.”

“Oh man . . . ”

“Car? House? Champagne?” (That last, admittedly, is a gotcha question for a 16-year-old.)

“I really want a car.”

“What kind?”

“An Acura NSX.”

“Acura? Why not a Bentley?”

“Oh yeah and a Bentley,” she says with a giggling flourish. “I’m gonna get a Bentley too.”

The only problem, I later learn, is that she doesn’t have a driver’s license. She has never had the time to get one, even though she is old enough. But being 16 also means wanting things you can’t have yet, like a $184,200 car, which Gabby will soon be able to pay for in cash.

Her story of triumph warms every heart. But she is also a part of the contemporary sports world, where elite athletic talent is perceived as an investment vehicle, a human hedge fund over which interested parties bitterly vie for control. In Gabby’s case this has meant the appearance of a father who, after years of alleged neglect, reappeared just as his daughter was becoming an Olympian, and a gym so anxious to keep the 14-year-old child it had trained for six years that its ownership offered to cover mortgage payments and give her financially struggling mother a job so that the daughter would stay and the gym could benefit from her success.

Which makes the tale of Gabby Douglas not exactly the story sold over and over by the media during the Olympics—heartwarming, yes, but sobering, too, thanks to the acrimony and infighting that has been swirling around her for the last two years.

Several hours later I am at the P&G U.S. Family Home with Gabby, her three siblings, and her mother, Natalie Hawkins. Gabby—or Brie, as the family calls her, another nickname for Gabrielle—is at the salon in the complex, set up by Olympic sponsor Procter & Gamble as a place where American athletes and their families can mingle, relax, and eat. This is something of a reunion for the family, as they have only rarely been all together in the nearly two years since Gabby left home in Virginia to train in an elite gym in Iowa, where she has been living like an exchange student with a host family.

The gymnast sits in a chair looking at herself in the mirror as a stylist does her hair and makeup for a new round of interviews—Good Morning America, the Web site iVillage, Extra, Us Weekly. At the moment, though, there are no other reporters around except me. So there is no smile. She looks at herself soberly, and there is a trace of teenage pout, as if to say she would rather be hanging with her brother and two sisters or her gymnastics teammates than being asked still more questions.

Her mother, Natalie, 42, is next to her. Mom is also getting a pruning, since she will participate in the interviews as well. She is attractive and beyond vivacious, like her daughter, but her greatest athletic exploits were as a high-school cheerleader.

Later, when we speak, Natalie does not hold back on the subject of the racial slights she felt Gabby faced after she began formal training in Virginia Beach, at the age of six. Nor does she hold back about the parents of other gymnasts who, she felt, looked at her as a pariah, an alien, a single black bank employee making around $45,000 a year in the midst of affluent white families headed by doctors and lawyers.

Her journey with her children has been a long and difficult one, fraught with financial struggles, especially after she went on medical leave from her job at HSBC about three years ago due to an adverse reaction to prescription medication. Her primary income is now a Social Security disability check, which has not always been enough to pay the utility bills, leading to foreclosure action on the town house where she lived with her children.

Natalie has been separated from Timothy Douglas, the father of Gabby and two of her siblings—sister Joyelle and brother Johnathan—since 2006. (Married twice, the couple is now in the process of divorcing.) According to Natalie and all four children, his financial and emotional support of the family has been negligible at best. “He was never really there,” says Gabby, though she recalls him taking her fishing a few times. When he appeared unexpectedly at the Olympic trials in San Jose, California, in July, Gabby felt he was trying to gain a piece of her “fame and fortune.” She remembers thinking, “We know what you’re trying to pull. It’s too late to hop on the bus.” Timothy also turned up at the Olympics but could not get a ticket to any of Gabby’s events, and Gabby never saw him. As for Natalie, two days before she left for London, she says, she went to court to challenge his lack of child-support payments, and the judge ordered the amount raised to $500 per month.

When I tried to contact Timothy Douglas at his home, in Chesapeake, Virginia, to learn his version of events, he refused to come to the phone. Douglas told the Daily Mail in London that he had had a role in Gabby’s life to the degree that he could, given his military obligations as a staff sergeant in the Air National Guard and what he described as prolonged deployments. It was in London, right before she competed in the gymnastics individual events—she came in last on the uneven bars and next to last on the balance beam—that Gabby learned that her father had been arrested the previous March, according to the Daily Mail, for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. (The juvenile court records are sealed.)

Gabby aces the TV inter­views. The questions are without variation, but she answers each as if it were something she had never been asked before—­a feat, by the way, which many Oscar winners can’t master. It’s as if she had been born to be interviewed, just as she was born to do gymnastics: her oldest sister, Arielle Hawkins, taught her how to do a two-handed cartwheel at the age of three; a year later Gabby taught herself how to do a one-handed version.

Six is a common age for girls to take up gymnastics in earnest, the beginning of what may be the longest and most brutal march in all of athletics if the goal is to make the Olympics. If you start at six, as Gabby did, you will have a window of roughly 10 years to reach your peak of flexibility and lower-body strength without becoming too big. Across those 10 years, Gabby endured somewhere around 18,000 hours of training—more than two solid years’ worth of gym time, or a fifth of her life since she took up the sport.

Starting in 2004, when she was eight, Gabby mostly trained at Excalibur Gymnastics, in Virginia Beach, a well-regarded program that has produced 10 members of the U.S. national team since 1995. Her mother soon began working nights so she could home-school Gabby, in large part because the training regimen made going to regular school impossible.

Gabby had the fearlessness and the athleticism to be an elite gymnast. She learned and blossomed at Excalibur, winning numerous Virginia State championships and medaling in international competitions, but tensions grew between the athlete and her coaches. In 2009 she broke a growth plate in her wrist. Injuries to gymnasts are commonplace, but Natalie says Gabby’s pediatrician told her the fracture was caused by “overtraining and overuse.” Dena Walker, the head coach at Excalibur and a financial partner in the gym, disputes that, and claims the onus for the injury was partly on Gabby because she waited roughly three weeks before she told anyone her wrist was bothering her. (“Not true,” says Gabby. “It was a week.”)

According to Gab­by she had run-ins as well with other gymnasts. One day in 2010, in a rush to get to the gym, she left her clothing by her locker; when she returned, her shirt was missing. “You don’t actually take by mistake someone’s clothes,” Gabby tells me. And when it was apparent that she had no shirt to leave the locker room in, other gymnasts started laughing at her. Another day, a gymnast whose turn it was to scrape the uneven bars of excess chalk tried to duck the job. According to Gabby, the girl said, “Why doesn’t Gabby do it? She’s our slave.” The gymnast was laughing, but Gabby did not see the humor.

Even more painful was an incident several years ago at a party where Gabby says an Excalibur staff member told her she might want to consider reconstructive surgery on her nose because of its flatness. Some other gymnasts had teased Gabby about her appearance, and she found the nose comment “very hurtful.”

While the shirt-taking may have been a common locker-room prank, the other incidents were obviously more troubling. Dena Walker says that coaches at the gym, which has been home to many African-American athletes, are on the lookout for racial animus and take action should something happen. Walker denies that anyone suggested Gabby get a nose job, calling the allegation “a joke,” and notes that Gabby never reported any of these incidents. According to Natalie, Gabby does have a tendency to keep things inside, and told her mother about these incidents only recently. “I was flabbergasted,” says Natalie.

Gabby never felt quite in sync with her coaches, and according to her sister Arielle, she eventually began to lose confidence in herself, particularly after the nose-job comment. Then she met coach Liang Chow at a gymnastics clinic and camp at Excalibur. He had trained 2008 Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson, and Gabby says that she felt instantly compatible with Chow, that he believed in her skills and she believed he would push her to achieve at an Olympic level. She says that her relationship with her primary coach at Excalibur, Gustavo Moure, had grown fractious and that “I didn’t feel like he could take me to my full potential.”

Gabby became determined to train at Chow’s gym, in West Des Moines. “I’ve got to get a coach I can believe in, and who believes in me,” she told her mother. But Natalie didn’t want the baby of the family to leave. Gabby, in a display emblematic of her determination, played her trump card: coming home from Excalibur one day, she told her mother, “If I don’t change coaches, I’m quitting.”

Natalie, as she had done in the past, told her daughter that she needed to “suck it up,” that the nature of the sport, and life, is to deal with obstacles. But Gabby had her own comeback: “If this was happening to you, how well would you suck it up?”

Her mother had no answer.

Gabby’s departure from Excalibur led to hard feelings on both sides. Walker claims the gymnast “had a bad attitude” at times and grew frustrated with Moure “because she expected things to come faster than they would.” All the same, according to Walker, she and Moure were shocked that Gabby left. Moure seconded that feeling in an e-mail: “We did with Gabby far beyond what are our coaches’ duties. We are proud of what we did. How is it possible . . . to not recognize that she reached [her] level with our help, our economic support, our passion and our love?”

When Natalie told Excalibur that Gabby was considering leaving, Walker and Moure asked, “What do you need?,” and offered to help Natalie out financially and give her a job—offers Natalie says she declined. The gym had already fronted roughly $20,000 over the previous two and a half years for Gabby’s tuition and for travel expenses to competitions. Walker and Natalie Hawkins disagree about whether the money was to be considered a scholarship or a loan, and under what terms the money might be paid back. The dispute has become so acrimonious that Excalibur has consulted a lawyer about a possible lawsuit.

But it is not uncommon for an elite gymnast to change coaches in the hope of making the Olympics. Bela Karolyi, the former coach and dean of women’s gymnastics, told the Des Moines Register as much at one point, saying that Gabby “needed better coaching, a proper instructor.” Nevertheless, at his first meeting with Natalie, Chow was up-front. “I know she’s pretty talented,” he said, “but I don’t have a lot of time to work with her.” This was in July 2010, about 23 months before the Games began.

In October of that year, Natalie flew to Des Moines with her daughter, to get her settled. Travis and Missy Parton and their four daughters became Gabby’s host family. The Partons, who own a lawn-and-home-maintenance company, had talked with Chow about taking in a gymnast; their only criterion was that she be of Olympic caliber. Gabby was shy at first, reluctant to ask for anything, but she and her second family soon knitted together. Nevertheless, success and loneliness seemed to go hand in hand. In October 2011, Gabby helped the U.S. team win the gold medal at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships. The meet was in Tokyo, and the moms of all the U.S. gymnasts were there, except Natalie. Gabby called her, crying, “I’m all alone. I’m so alone.”

During the Christmas holiday Gabby’s siblings (except for Arielle) and mother visited. Gabby suffered a crippling case of homesickness when they left. She wanted to go home. But with the help of her mother and Chow and Missy and Travis Parton, she worked through it. Missy believes that homesickness was certainly part of Gabby’s desire to leave, but that the other part, virtually never mentioned in the thousands of stories that have now been written about her, was fear of failure: “It was overwhelming to her that this was it, what she had been training for for 9 or 10 years.”

Her decision to stick it out in Iowa, says Missy, was the pivotal turning point, if there was one. “Once she made the decision ‘I’m going to stay,’ that was the moment of change within her. A new form of Gabby came out.”

Another hard decision was made, once again reflective of the unforgiving demands of the Olympic dream. It was determined that seeing her family was too great an emotional distraction for Gabby. So for the roughly eight months leading up to the Games, she did not.

Gabby is grumpy as she walks into the upstairs loft area of a London studio the next day to get her makeover for a Vanity Fair photo shoot with Jonas Fredwall Karlsson. She is apparently always crabby when she gets up or when she is hungry.

“You get any sleep?” her mother asks. (Gabby is staying with the team at the Olympic Village, while her family has rented a flat in East London.)

“Yeah.”

“A little bit?”

“Yeah.”

The monosyllables are another welcome reminder that she still can be a teenager. A hairstylist and assistant and makeup artist work on her in preparation for one of the shots. They surround her like vines wrapped around a flower, feverishly primping. Lost in a music video, she stares into the screen of her iPad as if they weren’t even there. It is once again a welcome sign of youth, her youth, but I cannot help but wonder how long it will last. Is it even really lasting now, with too many people buzzing around her?

Gabby walks downstairs, into the vast, nearly empty studio. A trampoline is in the center, flanked by an American flag so big it would make Patton proud. Behind the trampoline are Gabby’s mother and brother and sisters. As part of the shot, they will wave with outstretched arms as Gabby bounces high with that rarest combination of fluidity, flexibility, and raw athleticism.

As some last-minute adjustments are made before the shooting begins, Gabby stands on the trampoline and talks with her family. The peals of laughter, from everyone, ring like joyous London church bells (if there is such a thing), the inherent drabness of the cavernous room suddenly flooded with a special energy. In its own way the family’s palpable love is as stirring as Gabby’s performance on that indelible night when she beat the Russian Viktoria Komova to win the individual all-around, when she hugged Liang Chow and whispered to him, “Thank you for everything,” and when Natalie released what felt like a lifetime of tears.